Getting the most out of Kubernetes

With multi-cloud environments on the rise, use of containers is soaring

Seventy-three percent of companies now have at least one application, or a portion of their computing infrastructure already in the cloud. With multi-cloud environments on the rise, containers have become a major driving force for businesses and developers because of their portability between cloud providers.

However, despite this rapid adoption, businesses are facing challenges with unlocking the full value of containers, as it takes some knowledge of the processes and enabling technology. Without the right solution to manage these containers, IT teams could very quickly end up with security and uptime issues as a result of moving workloads from cloud to cloud.

With these challenges in mind, many businesses are looking to Kubernetes as the solution, due to its ability to work in any cloud environment – which makes it an ideal container orchestration solution for a multi-cloud deployment strategy.

Globally, Kubernetes adoption has been growing significantly, reaching 27 percent adoption this year – double that of 2017. However, only 5 percent of Sydney companies are using the platform. With major cloud deployment services like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Docker now supporting Kubernetes, there’s no doubt it is quickly becoming the de facto standard for the orchestration of containers. However, the widespread adoption of Kubernetes brings many obstacles for users.

Challenges using Kubernetes

One of the major difficulties users of Kubernetes encounter is the lack of knowledge and tools to effectively manage Kubernetes clusters that are changing frequently due to workload demands. That can make it difficult to see how Kubernetes is deployed in the environment.

Users also often find it difficult to monitor Kubernetes in enterprise environments. This is because Kubernetes lacks a detailed monitoring solution to deliver critical insights to IT specialists.

The inability to monitor the deployment of Kubernetes can make it difficult to track availability of services and overall performance. This can become particularly tricky when considering the complex infrastructures in which cloud services from different providers are used.

The portability that Kubernetes offers only works if IT specialists receive detailed information about the performance of the containers, applications and the supporting infrastructure, and this isn’t always the case.

Why Kubernetes needs better monitoring

Businesses experimenting with Kubernetes in production environments often start with monitoring tools that are developed and maintained by the community. However, while these tools offer insight into the health of Kubernetes, they lack the necessary capabilities to handle the dynamic nature of the container solution. While there are myriad monitoring solutions that provide some amount of information into Kubernetes environments and infrastructure, to get true insight with these tools users need to cobble them all together - at which point they’ve essentially become an open source tools integrator.

The ideal APM solution for Kubernetes should allow the user to monitor every component of a distributed application and infrastructure. It should also offer end-to-end visibility into application and business performance, streamlining monitoring operations and reducing MTTR.

Kubernetes allows businesses to do more with less by leveraging transferability and isolation through containers, enabling them to ship more features faster by simplifying application packaging and deployment. But businesses require tools to identify the root cause of performance issues in real time. If IT teams cannot clearly monitor Kubernetes performance and the correlation between this and business metrics, then the technical benefits that Kubernetes offers cannot be fully realised.

Mykhaylo Shaforostov is CTO and director of systems engineering APAC at AppDynamics.

 

Join the newsletter!

Or

Sign up to gain exclusive access to email subscriptions, event invitations, competitions, giveaways, and much more.

Membership is free, and your security and privacy remain protected. View our privacy policy before signing up.

Error: Please check your email address.

Tags AppDynamicsKubernetes

More about AmazonAPACAPMAppDynamicsAWSMicrosoftMicrosoft Azure

Show Comments
[]